Rules vs. Style

"Get to know the best that there is and was; in every period there have been progressive innovations that represent a better way to live. Get the feeling of different materials, colors, and lighting, of the flow of line in  a piece of furniture, of different spatial proportions. Don't limit yourself to looking at lamps and chairs and your neighbors' houses. Look at paintings and sculpture and chateaux. Even if what you see is far beyond what you ever thought of or could afford for yourself, your experience can be reflected in your home. Even non-visual arts can contribute by affecting the kind of person you are and the emotions you project into the space around you."

-from "Lifespace: a New Approach to Home Design" by Spiros Zakas, 1977

I've mentioned before my affinity for seventies design books, and "Lifespace" by Spiros Zakas, a new acquisition, is a good one. In the quote above, replace the word "furniture" with "clothing" and "home" with "wardrobe" and you have a pretty good quip about why developing a great sense of style has little to do with following trends and rigid sets of rules.

A kilim rug with a glas and chrome coffee table and a collection of African art? Not unlike wearing a button down oxford and repp tie with pleated trousers and suede shoes if you ask me.

Legend and Reality

A "Brooks Brothers Man", circa 1980s. Via The Trad

A current "Brooks Brothers Man". Photo via BrooksBrothers.com

There is a lot that continues to amaze me about the thing we have taken to calling, for lack of a better term, the "online menswear community". The very existence of such a thing in the first place is enough to astound anyone old enough to remember what life was like before such large portions of it were spent in front of any one of a number of screens. At the age of 37, I just barely make that category, but I can still remember stretching the phone cord down the hall from the kitchen to my room for some privacy.

 By and large, the world of blogs and websites devoted to menswear, or anything else, has proved to be a largely positive thing. There is no end of information readily available on any subject, and with it comes an even wider range of opinion and comment. All that's good, but it can lead to a blurring of the lines between legend and truth, and can foster a spirit of extreme narrow-mindedness about rules, regulations, and traditions, be they real or imagined. Nowhere it seems is this truer than in the circles of menswear enthusiasts, with Brooks Brothers so often saddled with the dual personality of Vanguard of Tradition/Soulless Traitor, or rather Legend/Reality.

If you're reading this blog, chances are you have at least once encountered a blog or website where some one happened to mention that Brooks Brothers clothes are not precisely the same as they may have been some time ago, which was quickly followed by a torrent of comments bemoaning everything from the difficulty one has in finding a dartless jacket to the absolute downfall of civilization as we know it.  I would never say that there is no meaning attached to the things we were, but the fervor over the smallest minutiae that tends to occur when discussing menswear, particularly "traditional" menswear, can be staggering. Too bad, really, as this sort of thinking misses the point entirely of dressing well or with style. 

Pictured above are two men representing Brooks Brothers. The first is from a mid-1980s catalog, the second from the current website. Both men wear a charcoal striped business suit. The first, a three piece, no doubt in a conservative, natural shouldered, three button "sack" (dartless) cut with flat front trousers. His hair is grey, distinguished. He is a grown up, no kidding.The second man's suit is cut in a more modern "trim" style. Some might say that his clothes look to small, and I would agree. But remember, he is a model on a website, not you. There is nothing stopping you from buying the same suit he is wearing in a size that fits you more appropriately. Lets not forget also that the first man is not  real person, but a watercolor painting.

You know the drill, you've heard it all before : "That suit is deplorable. Brooks should be ashamed.", "I blame the Italians.", or best "Why can't Brooks Brothers make things like they used to?" I mean, god help them, don;t they know there are literally dozens of us who would buy a frumpy sack suit from them, as long as it also met a further list of minute requirements?

The fact is that the world is not the same place it was forty years ago. Brooks Brothers is a huge international company making business decisions based on things bigger than the tastes and proclivities of an increasingly small pocket of men in the United States. Simple as that. You may hear people bemoaning what they see as the death knell for Brooks all over the menswear blogs, but as far as I can see, from a business stance, they seem to be doing just fine. That is, after all, what businesses do. Besides, so many of the Legends of Brooks Brothers could stand to be tempered with a healthy brick of salt. The "rules" that are regarded as sacrosanct when it comes to this stuff were never really so strictly observed by the real men of New England who wore this stuff.

I was reminded of this recently while on a consignment house call in an affluent Massachusetts suburb. The clothing I was looking at belonged to a deceased surgeon. It was all very traditional, lots of Brooks Brothers. There were grey sack suits and three patch pocket blazers, plenty of striped ties. But among the stacks of khakis, cords, and moleskins, I found as many pleated fronts as flats. There were button down and point collar shirts in the same closet. Some jackets had darts, some didn't. And they were all worn together by the same man, a real "Brooks Brothers Man" if you will. True, there was a traditional East Coast consistency in his style, but nowhere did I see rigid adherence to minute rules.

The "sack suit" has been romanticized to represent some sort of lost ideal of manhood, maybe, or something. But let's not forget that the undarted jacket and flat front pants, even the two button cuffs, were likely cost saving decisions made so long ago by Brooks Brothers, when the sack suit was the first off the rack clothing available. I love a good sack suit as much as the next traditionalist, but you might say those details also represent the inception of mass-produced clothing. We can thank Brooks Brothers for that, along with the  introduction of Dupont Dacron Polyester. Look where those two innovations led. These facts are easily ignored or forgotten in these discussions. So can we really be surprised or blame Brooks Brothers for paying attention to the market and making business decisions based not on the grousing of a few but the potential to sell as many items as possible? Isn't that kind of what they've always done? Legend/reality?

If what I've said seems negative or bleak, it shouldn't. There is a positive in all this. The world will likely never require men to dress as well as they once did, but that makes doing all the more an act of individuality and self expression. Where the suit was once a type of conformity, it now as frequently represents the opposite. So don't get bogged down in silly rules regarding pleats and vents and button down collars. Let your tastes guide you. Real style never had much to do with rules anyway. Dressing well should be enjoyable. I believe we should venerate what is good in our past, and that these days the "new" is so revered for its own sake that we tend to neglect the past. However, pining for an idealized version of the past and constantly whining about change neither venerates the past nor respects the present or future. It only shows you've missed the point. Don't confuse legend and reality.

Dress well and enjoy it. Otherwise, what's the point?

The Trouble With Menswear Blogs...

"If you're going to have a personal style blog, have some f***ing personal style"

Mitchell J. Goldstein nails it with his piece "An Unstructured Rant on the Current State of #menswear" A good laugh, worth a read, but I warn you, no pictures.

Reader Questions : One for the Ladies

An Affordable Wardrobe is proud to feature our first query proferred by a female reader. It's reassuring to know that I have a female readership here, and admittedly a bit frightening to think that a woman would ask my advice on how to shop for clothes, but I am honored to make an attempt.

Reader Natalie writes:

I know you have a general rule to not share decent thrift store locations, but I was wondering if you would be willing to bend that principle and share locations where there are decent options for the fairer sex. Perhaps I have been looking in all the wrong places, but my explorations into various consignment stores and goodwills around Cambridge have turned up nothing but heavily dated clothing and unreasonable prices. I ask simply because it is not as though I would be encroaching on your territory, and new, good quality clothing for women is either non-existent, or wallet killing.

The short answer to the specific question is that I really don't know where to look for good women's clothing on the extreme cheap. Frankly, I don't even glance at that stuff when I'm out "hunting", so I don't even need to break my vow of silence to answer you truthfully. My apologies.

However, this is a great question because it gets at a lot of broader issues that warrant our attention here, and that's what my focus will be.

When it comes to clothing in general, women are simultaneously at an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage comes in the fact that women's clothing offers a far wider variety of expressive forms than men's clothing ever will. Exotic fabrics, asymmetry, bold color combinations, stylish anachronism and androgyny are only a few of the tricks women can use that men simply can not touch. But that's also the curse in some ways, especially as it applies to second hand shopping.

I've often heard it said that fashion is mainly for women while tradition is a man's game. It may be true that fashion for men does in fact exist, but the strong suit of menswear is it's relative immutability. The suit, sports jacket and shirt and tie combo as we know has remained relatively unchanged for nearly two hundred years. Just look at the men in the illustration above, circa late nineteenth century. They are wearing suits and ties, not that far different than a suit and tie today. Take away the hats and stiff shirt collars and their clothes are a form of what the well dressed man still wears to this day. This makes it easier for a man to shop thrift, for a well cut jacket rendered in good cloth will not only flatter him be it fifty years or two days old, it will likely fit in seamlessly with his existing wardrobe.

Women's clothing, on the other hand, is known for undergoing constant seismic shifts in style. Year to year, season to season, the rules are constantly changing on a drastic level. See the lady in the illustration, out of place when taken out of her time. While this means that for the ladies there is always something new and fun to try out, I feel it is generally a trick designed to appeal to the misogynistic idea that "women love to shop", and so force them to keep shopping. For this very reason, more women's clothing seems to be produced cheaply of cheap cloth, and as such it also appears "dated" in a way that is more glaring than with menswear.

There is a bright side in all this. I've been fortunate to know many women of style in my life, and they've all been able to incorporate very clearly "horribly dated" vintage items into their everyday wardrobes far more effortlessly than most men can. For example, the right woman can wear a 1967 era sun dress in large scale paisley to a casual party with much greater ease and aplomb than a man can wear a velvet suit and neckerchief to the same party. The right woman can wear 1970s fully flared high waisted faded jeans with a brand new top a lot easier than a man can wear white stacked heel loafers with his navy blue suit today. The right woman can wear men's clothes in a feminine way better than a man can wear women's clothes in a masculine way. Women may have to work a lot harder at it, since the rules are not set in stone for the ages the way they are for men, but they also get to have a lot more fun and indulge in a greater deal of expressive creativity than most men could ever dream of.

 As for the so called "classic styles" I can only offer the same advice I give my male readers: get a good tailor and make a friend of them. Classics are great, but don't forget you can tweak them. You may find a lot of well made pleated skirts from the late 1980s that look a bit frumpy, but what if you shortened them an inch or two?  What if you took the shoulder pads out of that beautiful wool blazer and had them replaced with softer ones? What if you just said "no" to that awful Christmas sweater, realizing that irony is best used in theatre, not your own clothes?

So, to return to the actual question at hand, I'm afraid I simply cannot help....but I'm glad you asked. My warmest thanks to Natalie and all my lady readers.